Today we celebrate the birthday
… of Harry Morgan. Colonel Sherman Potter is 95. IMDb lists 161 credits for Morgan. If you’d like to see him as a relatively young actor, check out the 1943 classic “The Ox-Bow Incident.” Morgan was Henry Fonda’s sidekick. Great, great film.
You may not know the name Verna Felton, but you know the voice. She was the character actress heard in many Disney animations — a matriarchical elephant in Dumbo, the Fairy Godmother in Cinderella, the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, Aunt Sarah in Lady and the Tramp. She also appeared with Harry Morgan in an early fifties sitcom December Bride — and its 1960 spinoff Pete and Gladys. She died in 1966, but Morgan kept Felton’s photo on Sherman Potter’s desk on the M*A*S*H set to portray Mrs. Potter.
That’s Morgan in the photo, with Felton (right) and Spring Byington, who played the title role on the TV series, December Bride.
… of Max von Sydow, 81.
… of Omar Sharif. Dr. Zhivago is 78. Sharif was nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar for Lawrence of Arabia.
… of John Madden. He’s 74. Madden was the Raiders head coach for 158 games, including post season. His team won 112 of them including Super Bowl XI.
… of Don Meredith. He’s 72. “Turn out the lights, the party’s over.”
… of Paul Theroux (rhymes with through). He’s 69.
It’s the birthday of novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux, born in Medford, Massachusetts (1941). After college he decided to join the Peace Corps in 1963. He later said, “I had thought of responsibilities I did not want—marriage seemed too permanent, grad school too hard, and the army too brutal.” He said the Peace Corps was a kind of “Howard Johnson’s on the main drag to maturity.”
The Peace Corps sent him to live in East Africa. He was expelled from Malawi after he became friends with a group that planned to assassinate the president of the country. He continued traveling around Africa, teaching English, and started submitting pieces to magazines back in the United States. While living in Africa, he became friends with the writer V.S. Naipaul, who became his mentor and who encouraged him to keep traveling.
He had published several novels when he decided to go on a four-month trip through Asia by train. He wrote every day on the journey, and he filled four thick notebooks with material that eventually became his first best-seller, The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia (1975).
… of Steven Seagal. He’s 59. No Oscar nominations for Seagal, but he has been nominated for several Razzies and won once.
… of Anne Lamott. She’s 56.
It’s the birthday of novelist and essayist Anne Lamott, born in San Francisco, California (1954). In the late 1970s, her father was diagnosed with brain cancer, and she began to write short pieces about the effect of the disease on him and other members of her family, and these pieces became chapters of her first novel, Hard Laughter (1980).
She wrote three more novels over the next decade, but she didn’t have any big literary successes. Then, in her mid-thirties, she accidentally got pregnant and her boyfriend left her when she decided to keep the baby. For her first year as a single mother, she found herself on the edge of financial and emotional disaster. She was too busy to write fiction, so she just kept a daily journal of experiences as a parent, and that became her memoir Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year (1993). It was her first best-seller.
The Writer’s Almanac (2006)
“You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.” Anne Lamott, quoted at The Writer’s Almanac narrative for her this year.
… of Mandy Moore, 26.
The Pulitizer Prize winning author David Halberstam should have been 76 today.
One of America’s most successful authors, David Halberstam began his career as a journalist in the 1950s, first as a reporter for The Daily Times Leader in West Point, Mississippi and later for the Nashville Tennessean. In 1960 he joined The New York Times and shortly thereafter was assigned to the paper’s bureau in Saigon. Halberstam was among a small group of reporters there who began to question the official optimism about the growing war in Vietnam. Halberstam’s work from Vietnam so rankled official Washington that President Kennedy once asked the publisher of The New York Times to transfer Halberstam to another bureau. In 1964, at age 30, Halberstam earned a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Vietnam. His best-selling book, The Best and The Brightest, chronicles America’s deepening involvement in Vietnam through the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.
Joseph Pulitzer himself was born in Budapest, Hungary, on this date in 1847.
He came to this country, moved to New York City and bought The New York World newspaper. He said, “There is room in this great and growing city for a journal that is not only cheap but bright, not only bright but large, not only large but truly democratic — dedicated to the cause of the people rather than that of purse potentates — devoted more to the news of the New than the Old World; that will expose all fraud and sham; fight all public evils and abuses; that will serve and battle for the people with earnest sincerity.” With his profits, he endowed the Columbia School of Journalism as well as the annual Pulitzer Prizes for journalism, literature, drama, music.
Frances Perkins, the first woman presidential cabinet member — FDR’s Secretary of Labor — was born on this date in 1880. Perkins and Interior Secretary Harold Ickes were the only cabinet members to serve Roosevelt’s entire 12+ years. The Department of Labor Building in Washington is named for Secretary Perkins.
When Frances Perkins married in 1913 she had to go to court to win the right to keep her own name.